pbm2g3(1)

✨ pbm2g3 ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the mgetty+sendfax manual 💖 this is the page for pbm2g3(1), and honestly? it's giving tiny but mighty 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

pbm2g3 — convert portable bitmaps (PBM) into G3 fax files 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pbm2g3 [-r] [-w<pagewidth>] [-h<blanklines>] [-d] [-a] [pbmfile]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically it reads a portable bitmap as input, and converts it into a G3 fax file on stdout ✨ like, that's the whole job. and the file it spits out? perfect for faxing with sendfax(8), or for queueing it up for faxing with faxspool(1) — provided it gets a .g3 suffix, okay, don't forget that part or it's gonna be a whole situation 😭

also fun fact: faxspool(1) uses pbm2g3(1) internally to convert various bitmap formats into fax g3 format 👑 so yeah, she's the backbone. the main character, lowkey.

💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -a — byte-aligns the end-of-line codes, inserting padding bits as necessary. lil bits of padding, as a treat 🎀
• -w <page width> — sets the width of the resulting G3 page. default is 1728. now listen: if you wanna be able to fax it with sendfax, do not use anything else, fr fr. for other fax programs, 2048, 2432, 864 and 1216 may be useful. for other purposes? use what you like bestie, live your truth 🌈

if you set it to 0, the width of the pbm file will be used. iconic behaviour honestly.

• -h <blank lines> — specifies the number of blank lines pbm2g3 should prepend to each page. default is 0.

if you want to produce identical output as pbmplus' pbm2g3 program (with my patch! ✨) does, use -h 4.

• -r — reverse the bit order in the bytes. flipping it, turning it, slaying it 💅
• -d — will one day make pbm2g3 prepend a digifax header to the page. one day. someday. not today bestie 🙈

📚 REFERENCES 📚

the standard for Group 3 fax is defined in CCITT Recommendation T.4 📎 no cap, that's the source of truth.

💀 BUGS 💀

• the -d option isn't implemented yet. she's aspirational. she's a vision board option 🫶
• if a raw pbm file is converted, and the width of the g3 file is smaller than the width of the pbm file, the former is rounded up to the next multiple of 8. just so you know. math is math 🧚

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

g32pbm(1), pbm(5), sendfax(8)

🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

pbm2g3 is Copyright (C) 1993 by Gert Doering, <gert@greenie.muc.de>. it's similar to the pbmtog3 program in Jef Poskanzers pbmplus package, but it's a complete re-write. no code is copied. periodt. 💜

okay that's the whole page, bestie!! this came from the mgetty+sendfax manual, written by greenie on 27 Oct 93 — vintage, but make it slay 💖✨🎀